


Baptised and Reborn

by MissRachelThalberg



Category: The Bletchley Circle, The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco (TV)
Genre: F/F, Femslash, Fluff, Romance, Vintage lesbians are the best lesbians, Whiskey & Scotch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:34:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26091952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissRachelThalberg/pseuds/MissRachelThalberg
Summary: Jean's decided to stay in San Francisco; Millie could do with a clarification or two.
Relationships: Millie Harcourt/Jean McBrian
Comments: 11
Kudos: 39





	Baptised and Reborn

She’s still stacking the last of her clothes back onto the shelves – where, oddly, they appear to belong a lot more than they have a right to – when she hears Millie’s footsteps in the door-opening. Jean looks up, finds herself offered a glass of amber liquid, accepts.

Millie leans against the door-frame, hovers; Jean, ever practically-minded, turns toward the wardrobe again, then:

“Bourbon. Your hair.”

“Huh?”

These skirts have not multiplied since they were taken out of the wardrobe and put into the trunk, surely – this is exactly why Jean hasn’t moved London apartments since the end of the War, you disturb a perfectly good system and look what happens -

“Bourbon. And your hair.”

She turns, then, losing track of her trail of (organisational) thought, and finds Millie’s smirk much as always; her eyes oddly, are not. She gives up.

“Should’ve sold that one to the Germans in ’43, dear. It’s more cryptic than whatever they came up with.”

It’s light, it’s perfect, it’s _them_ – mostly, it’s an opportunity for the two of them to clink their glasses together, share a laugh, for Millie to offer to help her unpack, for her to decline, for them to retreat to the living room. Of course, ever inconvenient, Millie doesn’t take it.

Instead, she steps closer and clinks her glass to Jean’s – then nods, indicating.

“That’s why your hair was tousled, isn’t it? You and Hailey, your knickers. Swimming.”

Things click at last, and Jean chuckles out loud.

“Yes, I’d had my pins out. Now -”

She gives her folded skirts one final, neat pat, then sips her whisky and gestures in the direction of the living room.

“Let’s sit and enjoy your drinks, shall we? How’d the date go, then?”

No response. Millie flops down – it’s the only appropriate word – onto the sofa, all perfect long limbs in perfect tailored trousers, crosses her ankles, uncrosses them, kicks off her shoes and curls up her legs beside her. Jean, only a little wary, lowers herself down in the chair opposite, nursing her drink carefully between both hands.

“Well, I didn’t marry ‘im,” says Millie with great care, and Jean lifts one eyebrow.

“You didn’t marry ‘im? Millie, how many drinks have you had?”

She briefly considers feeling concerned, then remembers Millie is an aristocrat; they’re genetically coded to handle this. Millie, promptly reverting to a level of formality worthy of a duchess – which, she has previously clarified to Jean, she could have been, if only she’d said yes one summer afternoon in 1938! – purses her ruby red lips.

“I didn’t marry him, _dear_. Did you?”

“Marry him?”

“Marry _her_.”

Jean lets out a shocked chortle, unsettling her hair all over again and almost spilling her whisky straight down her lap. She laughs straight into Millie’s face – her friend’s unamused, designed-to-be-provocative smirk only makes the situation more absurd, more baffling.

“I don’t know where you’re from, dearie, but I doubt that’s legal, even in the New World.”

“It’s not a joke, Jean.”

It isn’t a joke; Jean can see that much. Millie’s had a few, but she isn’t drunk, not really. She is, however, just sufficiently inebriated to be absolutely honest - and something else – and _jealous_ , too, in that stroppy way people get in the pictures, where they sling around glasses and coats and scarves and limbs.

Millie has plenty of limbs.

Jean’s not a vain woman; she knows Millie’s a catch just as well as she knows she’s not, but she’s got enough healthy self-esteem to tell jealousy when she sees it.

“You’re staying because she asked, aren’t you? Not for me.”

It’s thrown onto the coffee table between them like Millie tosses her earrings there sometimes; casually, provocatively, meant to irritate, or to seduce, or to be sighed at, but not, never, to be ignored. Her hair, her _lovely_ hair, stands out like a halo from her slightly flustered face, and she’s vulnerable, vulnerable, _vulnerable_ , and it tugs at Jean’s heart like nothing ever before. It reminds her of a younger, softer Millie, of impossibly clipped vowels and awkward, finishing school flair, of Susan and of what she’d seen happening; of what she’d known had been none of her business, of what she’d recognized immediately because it was in her own nature, too. 

And then the years went by, and the new Millie was so confident she seemed taller even, and her vowels were clipped ironically now, as if (but not entirely) on purpose, and her flair had lost the finishing school and gained the world, and her heart was as big as ever but robust, protected, and -

Jean takes a moment, a breath - a sip, a chug of bourbon. She also takes a chance.

“You never,” she says carefully, to indicate that she’s the sober one here, thank you, _dear_.

“You never asked me to stay for you.”

“Did too.” Millie answers a little mulishly but, Jean notes with some satisfaction, with increased interest and sans smirk.

“No,” she spells it out. “You asked me to stay. There’s a difference.”

Millie takes that one on the chin, as the Yanks say. She looks down, this time – away from Jean for the first time since they sat down, here in the conundrum formerly known as their living room. She sloshes around the remaining liquid in her glass and nods to herself. She is, as ever, a clever girl.

“There is a difference.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“But.”

Millie looks up, then – and in that split second, she’s both, she’s the soft, soft child of twenty-three about to have her heart broken, and she’s the impossibly poised woman of thirty-six, with her suits and her manner and her cheekbones and her history.

Jean takes a breath. It’s not hard; she’s lived long enough to know that sometimes, it’s not hard.

“But I am staying for you.”

There’s silence; she fills it and pats her knees.

Millie stands up before she has the time to feel silly, and those limbs, in those trousers, sit down in Jean’s lap somehow; it even fits, she even fits, who’d have thought? Jean rests her hand on Millie’s lower back, steadying her; Millie leans into her. She looks – well, she looks radiant, and shy, and her mascara is running and her lipstick has been smirked to a smudge. And she is the one feeling silly, now; Jean knows her well enough to sense that.

When she kisses Millie for the first time, it’s a firm kiss; a kiss of claiming, sure, but also a kiss of reassurance, of promise, of history, of understanding – of steadiness. There’s going to be no ships taken and no trains missed, no husbands and no children, not this time, not with this one, not now.

Millie folds further into her, and when their faces come apart, finally, her lipstick is gone and her eyes are full of mischief. Jean can feel the whisky in her own veins, now – the whisky, and something else.

“Baptised -” she begins formally, throwing back the last of her whisky and burying the fingers of one hand in the auburn halo of Millie’s glorious hair. Millie beats her to it, this time; her fingers pull the pins out of Jean’s hair, her mouth is warm and wet and crushing and _home_.

“- and reborn.”


End file.
